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Grace in Small things

Thursday, February 08, 2007

Socks and Monsters

For a few months now, Brian has been contemplating the aquisition of some argyle socks. As with all major life changes, this sartorial switcheroo has been carefully pondered, researched, discussed with friends and significant others. "I've been thinking about getting some argyle socks," he said to me one day. "I think they'd go nicely with all the corduroy I've been wearing."

Of course, not everyone was supportive. Our friend Jason called them old man socks. I just teased and brought it up (repeatedly) over dinner with friends.

So the weeks went by, and like many people finding themselves at life's crossroads, Brian stalled out for a while. H&M's socks had skulls on them. The socks at the fancy shoe store near our house were twenty bucks a pop. Then he needed a new hard drive, and then a new planer. And the Search for Sock fell by the wayside, for the most part. So far, he only has one pair (selected for him, as a gesture of support, by the aforementioned Jason). But argyle remains a funny little obsession with him, and it's become one of our little rituals: window shopping wherever we go, looking for argyle socks, and then judging said socks on various criteria to determine whether or not they are in fact the argyle that he is looking for (pink and brown argyle will not do. Neither will argyle impersonaters that lazily substitute mere diamond shapes for the more complex traditional pattern. I'm looking at you, Donna Karan).

Anyway. That's that.

Today Brian and I went to the grocery store twice -- once for dinner things and once for juice. On the way back with our dinner things (pasta sauce has been on sale lately, it's all we eat. Well, we put it on pasta), Brian and I started talking about cats, and how he'd read this article about this parasite common in domesticated cat poo that causes "mass personality changes" in affected populations, the most consistent being "guilt proneness (a form of neuroticism)." Apparently when this same parasite makes its way into rats, it causes the rats to become "active, less cautious and more likely to be eaten by a cat, where the parasite completes its life cycle." And Brian was telling me that this isn't the only parasite like this! There's another one that affects ants, and needs to complete its life cycle inside a sheep. So it actually causes ants to climb up stalks of grass so that they'll be chomped up! Just like that!

So, yeah. Apparently Brian's infected with some sort of argyle parasite. It's just not ready to complete the cycle yet. And pink and brown just won't do.

Poor Brian. This is what he gets for bugging me to update my blog more.